Always with empathy

TRACY - Janet Thiessen, in her 20s and barely out of the police academy, cradled the troubled teenage boy as he died.

Daniel Thigpen

TRACY - Janet Thiessen, in her 20s and barely out of the police academy, cradled the troubled teenage boy as he died.

She had arrested him a few days earlier, one of her many run-ins with the kid in her first years patrolling Vancouver, Wash. It was night, and a shots-fired call led her to an apartment, where the teen had been drinking when he pointed a shotgun at his chest and fired.

Back at the station, Thiessen struggled to write the report that would be his obituary. She wondered if she could have reached out to him more. She shared her guilt with her boss.

"The comment from my sergeant was, 'Suck it up and get your report written,' " Thiessen recalls. "OK, that really was not what I needed in that moment in time. I needed a little bit of empathy."

That, she figured, was something she could offer if ever she were in charge.

Nearly 30 years later, she found her opportunity.

Only nine weeks into her tenure as Tracy's police chief, a devastated team of investigators had found little Sandra Cantu's remains stuffed in a suitcase that had been submerged. They had spent 10 days searching round-the-clock for the missing 8-year-old girl as if she were their own.

Thiessen's empathy was needed. She wanted detectives to talk openly about their feelings and insisted they seek grief counseling.

Throughout a 28-year law enforcement career that has taken her across the country and back again, Thiessen has pushed her officers to be tough on crime while embracing the human side of policing.

Cops need to deal with the emotions of witnessing routine tragedy, she says. They shouldn't become so cynical that they see all criminals as dirt bags.

And to the 50-year-old police veteran, writing a traffic ticket or making an arrest is an opportunity to either burn bridges or build connections in a community, depending on an officer's attitude.

"We need to teach (officers) to be human and empathetic," Thiessen said in a recent interview, "because the majority of people get into this line of work to help others."

Law enforcement was supposed to be a pit stop on the way to law school for the daughter of a farmer and nurse when she arrived in Vancouver in 1981. She crafted her policing philosophies - and, eventually, leadership style - during more than two decades of rising through the ranks.

Thiessen was that department's second female officer and quickly grew frustrated with its machismo culture. Some officers would not let her ride along. Others ignored her calls for backup.

In the meantime, gory crashes and grisly murders shook the young officer. She wondered if she was cut out for the work.

Worried more about failing, she stuck with it. She delved into community outreach, boosted her confidence while working in schools and neighborhoods, and learned how to control her emotions at a crime scene while addressing them later. She eventually became a deputy chief.

Near the top, she clashed with her chief over approaches to leadership. "I'm not as much into the chain of command, that paramilitary style," she would tell The Columbian newspaper in Washington. "That stuff drives me nuts."

She was ready to move on. Her home state of Kansas beckoned, and she became the top cop of Olathe, a fast-growing suburb of Kansas City.

In Olathe, now larger in population than Tracy, she emphasized community policing and staff development. Her department tackled high-profile cases: arrests in a 20-year-old cold murder case, the abduction, rape and murder of a teen girl and the killing of an Olathe officer's stepdaughter.

Inside the department, there were uphill battles. The town's first female chief, she was also "that chief from the Left Coast" in a region resistant to change, she recalls.

While she wouldn't discuss specifics, she said she disciplined and fired unethical officers. As she sought to reorganize resources, she tried to remove others off of special assignments.

"I think Janet's a very ethical person and has some very high ethical standards," said Michael Wilkes, Olathe's city manager. "Sometimes that leads to decisions that aren't necessarily the most popular in the department."

Thiessen says her calls cost her support, and she and Wilkes eventually agreed on her resignation.

"When your political capital starts eroding, you have some decisions to make," she said.

In January, Tracy officials announced they had hired Thiessen to take over the 149-person department - slightly smaller than Olathe's - for exiting Chief David Krauss. She started the next month and spent her first weeks trying to settle in, getting to know officers and the community. Officers said she was a quicker study than usual.

Her transition was cut short. Just weeks in, Sandra Cantu disappeared from her trailer park in the northern edge of town. Detectives worked 36 straight hours during the search. The station opened its emergency operations center for only the second time in the department's history.

As detectives worked leads through the night, Thiessen labored alongside.

"To see that she was in there with us, that showed a lot. That earned a lot of respect," Tracy police Sgt. Luis Mejia said. "She was definitely the leader, and everybody looked to her for direction."

With a case that drew national attention, the case was a tremendous test not only for the department but for its new leader.

"It was like having another partner. She was like another investigator," said Detective Nate Cogburn. "I didn't see the stress in her, and that motivated us to work harder. We were under a lot of pressure."

On April 6, when Sandra was found dead, Thiessen said she focused on the immediate needs: how to shift gears in the investigation and console the girl's family. The new chief's voice broke when she announced to the world that Sandra was murdered.

Then she took a moment to tend to something that, when she was a rookie cop, her supervisors rarely addressed: her own feelings.

She left the news conference and walked upstairs.

"Then I got up and went to my office for a little bit just by myself, and I was just kind of like, ... " she paused and sighed heavily. "I just needed a little bit of alone time to just kind of process and, for me, let my emotions out. We just see a lot of very sad things. And you can't change them."